Monday, May 10, 2010

Allow me to recommend TextExpander and Dropbox

I'm fond of TextExpander; some people rave about it. I think it's handy, I can type "ttel" and TextExpander turns that into my phone number; I have other snippets for my websites, email addresses, and I've imported some libraries with HTML tags and autocorrections for common typos. It's handy.

I have a byzantine, quintuple-redundant backup system, with a Time Machine backup in my lab, a clone of my hard drive at home, two daily Flash stick backups, and a Dropbox backup. Dropbox gives me 2 GB of storage for free; there are paid plans for more space, but I don't worry about that, I just use Dropbox to back up my most important files and settings. Dropbox is an application you can install on all of the computers you use, and it will sync a folder across the cloud, so you have access to all of your stuff everywhere. I just use it as an extra backup.

Anyway, today, I noticed that my TextExpander snippets had disappeared, I don't know what happened. I went to dropbox.com, found my TextExpander settings, clicked Previous Versions, picked a working copy of my settings from a couple of days ago, clicked Restore, and immediately TextExpander was working again. TextExpander is a handy program that gets bonus points for having an open way of storing its settings, so that it's easy to back up and throw around. I'm shocked by how well Dropbox's version control worked.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Blog Widget by LinkWithin